When it comes to war movies, there are some war movies that skim the surface of the depiction of soldiers fighting for their lives on the battlefield or sometimes, an actor who plays a ranked officer or general who blows their whistle while deafening noises of explosion and ricocheted bullets and says, "Follow me, men!" like it is some sort of pretend game of war. But very few war movies had experience the horrors of war such as Apocalypse Now, Patton and the climactic sniper scene in Full Metal Jacket. But, Saving Private Ryan in its prolonged battle sequences is filmed from the eyes of the point of view of American soldiers as they are in peril on the beaches of Normandy and at Vierville.
Steven Spielberg has already been established as one of the most hailed directors of our time with Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Color Purple and Schindler's List. But, rarely, there has been a movie that has re-written the history books of war films and film itself. This movie changed the game of storytelling and filmmaking that Spielberg took the approach to film the sequences with a handheld camera to demonstrate his focus on the perils of war because the camerawork depicts a soldier's experience on the battlefield and at times, we feel like even thought the battle sequences are spectacular, the battle sequences are also ghastly and vociferous that you feel like you are in combat with the soldiers.
After the battle, we witness the blood-soaked beach and ocean full of dead bodies including one in particular with an inscription of S. Ryan on the back of his uniform. A typewriter writing letters to the dead soldiers' families notice that Ryan and the two other soldiers with the same name are in the same family. General George Marshall (Harve Presnell) are informed of the situation and that his mother will receive three telegrams in the same day. He learns that the fourth son, Private James Ryan (Matt Damon) is a paratrooper and is missing in action in Normandy. Marshall reads Lincoln's Bixby letter and orders that Ryan must be found and must get sent home.
Three days after D-Day, Miller is ordered to find Ryan and bring him back to the front. He assembles six men to find and save Ryan: Sgt. Mike Horvath (Tom Sizemore), Privates First Class Reiben and Caparzo (Edward Burns and Vin Diesel), Privates Mellish and Jackson (Adam Goldberg and Barry Pepper), medic Irwin Wade (Giovanni Ribisi) and Corporal Upham (Jeremy Davies), a cartographer who speaks French and German. They all ask the question as to why they are all risking their lives to save one man in a "needle full of needles".
The movie's 24-minute opening sequence has the most graphic war footage I've ever seen in its genre. The fleet, from their feared closeups, is faced with a myriad of countless German troops thinking they have a slim to an impossible chance to survive. Spielberg's camerawork of the battle is unforgettable as it captures the soldiers having nowhere to hide and even soldiers who are nearly dying or who are so confused that one thinks when picking his arm, he needs it for later. It is haunting to see soldiers with their intestines hanging out crying for their mothers.
Janusz Kaminski, the cinematographer, has developed a newsreel or war footage type of feel to the picture as we, the audience, is flashing back to the events of World War II. The cinematography captures the movie like the story is a small chapter of history within a big chapter of history. The movie provokes you to think and understand what all the soldiers go through from a broad perspective because you were not there at that time.
Aside from the grand aspect of the filmmaking, it is all about the human element regarding brotherhood, opinions about the war and family. SPOILER ALERT! There is a moment in the movie in which the group is meeting with the 101st Airborne Division and even though Miller and the company will not take a French family's children, Caparzo defies the Captain's orders by taking the child because she reminds him of his niece, but his good-natured decision costs him his life as a German sniper shoots him from a good distance. That scene tells us even though a man has a great conscience and make a moral decision, it is most likely that life will treat unfairly once he will be on a battlefield. It is essential.
But, also, there is a scene in which a good and innocent conscience changes as an inexperienced soldier witnesses his fellow soldier's death as a German slowly kills him with his knife which is painful to watch. That scene transcends an innocent's life to now a person who will have a guilty conscience forever because of his lack of combat and he did not do anything to save him or prevent him from getting killed. As the German sees him crying, the killer leaves him alone.
Tom Hanks' character is a very good one as he was an English schoolteacher but now has a hand that shakes as it comes since he has deployed and it comes and goes as Sgt. Horvath thinks that the job does not seem to agree anymore. There is a good scene in which he and Sizemore have a conversation in the church about how the cost of men's lives in a mission saves ten times or twenty times the amount of people. It means that the person in command who makes the decision rationalizes between the mission and the men and Horvath says that the mission is about saving a man. Miller replies, "This Ryan better be worth it."
Spielberg also frames his close-up shots with people not just taking courses of action but mostly, people thinking or evoking an idea. As Spielberg said in an interview, he loves to film people who are in a state of thought or embodying ideas and that not many filmmakers capture a person solely thinking in open space. There are many shots of that including two in which Miller looks to the distance after the Normandy invasion and Reiben looking at the wrong Ryan who is saying that he wants to go home thinking there may be no chance to find the right Private Ryan. It is those little details that capture a great war movie and not solely the action sequences. The dialogue between the soldiers, the great score by John Williams and the sound mixing regarding the explosions, planes and gunfire is sublime and even though movies such as Black Hawk Down, Letters from Iwo Jima and The Hurt Locker come close, Saving Private Ryan changed the whole game for war movies in general.
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